Most of us watch the TV program that is the greatest interest to us. Valerie and I watch the remodeling – landscaping shows because that what we are working on. Other people I know don’t miss Rachel Ray or Emeril if they can help it. And still others watch the golf pros or the tennis pros. Certainly, we watch because it is entertaining. But many of us watch because we want to learn more about our passion. Valerie and I want to know more about how to work on the house and what the possibilities for change are. People watch the world’s best chefs and then head to their own kitchen. I imagine that all of us would jump at the chance to have one on one instruction from one of those TV greats. Norm Abrams can do my carpentry any day. Any of you want Rachel Ray in your kitchen?

The disciples that followed Jesus were no different than us. They watch Jesus with a sense of awe. And they watched Jesus to learn from him. Certainly they noticed that Jesus was a man of prayer. Whatever emotion or problem confronted Jesus, he prayed about it. When he was too tired from all the demands of the people needing healing, he withdrew to pray. When he heard that John the Baptist was dead, he withdrew to pray. When the disciples were facing issues and he was concerned about them, he prayed. And certainly when he faced his greatest challenge – the cross that lay before him – he went to the garden of Gethsemane and he prayed. Everything about Jesus showed that he was comfortable with prayer and that prayer was the answer to all of his concerns both large and small. Prayer seemed to come naturally to Jesus. It seemed to be the key to all his successes in life and in his ministry. But more than that prayer also filled Jesus with peace and grace. It gave him more power and more wisdom to do the Parent’s will on earth.

I am more like the disciples and I imagine you are too. There is Peter who is a man of action. He is always ready to take on the challenges but I don’t recall reading any accounts of Peter retired to pray before he flew into doing what he thought needed to be done. And there were James and John – called the Sons of thunder. They too acted immediately and often with great emotion. So I am sure that they struggled with prayer just the way you and I do. After watching Jesus for a long time, they finally got up enough courage to ask him to teach them to pray. Now they were Hebrews – they knew how to pray in the Jewish way. But they wanted to be able to pray the way Jesus prayed. I imagine Jesus was just waiting for them to ask him to teach them. Jesus knows that prayer is our communication with God the Parent. In our own relationships, we know that when our communications are strained, the quality of the relationship is poor. If you don’t speak to your parents or your spouse is giving you the silent treatment, the quality of the relationship is lacking.

God certainly doesn’t want us – the children of God – to struggle in our communication with God. God wants us to be able to talk to God as freely as we talk to our closest friend. God wants us to relish prayer not be frightened of it. God wants us to be experts in prayer – not struggling as beginners. Raise your hand if you know you are already an expert in prayer. Those of you who are experts can nap or use the next few minutes as a refresher. The rest of us want to become more expert in praying. We want to understand why our mind wanders when we try to pray and learn how to improve. Many of us experience three problems with prayer.

Problem number one is the “who” problem. Problem number two is the “where” problem and Problem number 3 is the “what” problem. The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, the prayer that Jesus left us to pray addresses all three of these problems. The first problem is WHO. We start out with “Our Parent” or Our Creator. We might also say Our Father. This who is so personal. We aren’t praying to the ancient God of the Hebrews. We aren’t praying to some unknown Deity. We are our praying to “Our God” – our very own creator. When someone is ours – we feel that special closeness. Jesus taught us to start our prayer “Our Parent”. When Jesus taught the disciples he used the word “Abba”. It is the equivalent of the English word “Daddy”. It is a very familiar greeting. And it is one that brings to mind loving and caring. We use Parent or Creator today because each of us needs to us the word that conveys that warmth, that love, that concern and caring to us.

There is another aspect of beginning our prayer by addressing God. When you have a conversation with someone, do you pay more attention to the conversation when you start it by addressing the person you are talking to. If I say Valerie, I want to tell you about my day. It is more meaningful than if I just start babbling about my day. I have indicated that I am talking specifically to her. I am not likely to wander from the conversation and forget who I am talking to. Our mind can wander when we pray. Starting by calling God by name helps us to stay focused on the conversation – centered in prayer. The first two words of the prayer are so important because they establish the “WHO”.

Then Jesus goes on to tell us about the “where”. We pray our Parent who art in heaven. That sounds so very far away to us. In our lifetime, people have been to the heavens. Astronauts go into space and live there for months. Man has walked on the moon. “Heaven” seems even farther away than all that. For many of us God in Heaven seems very distant – very remote. That can leave us feeling very alone and wondering if our prayers are being heard at all. Sometimes, we can wonder if our prayers are just lost in space as my email seems to be in cyberspace sometimes. We are so familiar with the Lord’s Prayer that we don’t look critically at it.

I was surprised when I discovered this week that the meaning of the word we recite as “heaven”. The Greek word used for heaven is “uranos”, where we get the name of the planet Uranus. In this prayer it is used in the plural not the singular, so we are praying to our loving, familiar Parent, the one in the heavens. When this word is used in the New Testament it is used in the sense of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘sky’ or ‘the air around us’, not in the sense of a galaxy far, far away. What we are actually praying is Our Loving, Caring, Familiar Parent, who is closer than the very air we breathe. You see we are not praying to a distant, formal unknowable and untouchable Deity.

We are praying to one so dear and so near that even our whispers can be heard and that we cannot utter can be felt in the very heart of God as we earnestly pray. In that opening phrase, we have the “who” and the “where” of our prayers.

The ‘what” often gives us concern. So often we think our problems are either too small to bother God with or so large – so unsolvable that even God will not be able to do a thing about them. Either way we are missing out on tremendous blessings by not sharing our small worries, our large worries, our small victories and large successes with the most loving, most powerful companion we have in our live. God is concerned with all our concerns. Several more sermons can be preached on the “what’ of prayer that Jesus has outlined for us in the Lord’s Prayer. But I know you don’t want to stay for several more hours. So I will leave those sermons for another time.

This morning remember the words of Jesus: You have not because you ask not. Prayer is our communication with our beloved Parent. God is with us, waiting for us to communicate, waiting for us to tell God all our needs and all our praises. God is waiting to bless us in ways we never dreamed possible. Starting this moment, resolve to pray and you will find that prayer changes things. Amen.